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This chapter argues against the view that Derrida's emphasis on change makes him complicit in the neoliberal requirement of flexibility that results both in precarity and in the dominance of English. To the contrary, the essay argues that Derrida's idea of 'différance' includes the view that openness both involves loss and is always partial (since incision involves excision), that the singular is precious, and that deconstruction is justice since it is alert to what is excluded even by efforts at inclusiveness. Examples of the preciousness and loss of the singular are circumcision (where incision is excision), hospitality (in which unconditional hospitality has material limitations and conditions), subjectivity (which is never based on full presence), language (which both is my own and comes from an other), and neighbourhoods (since they continue only by incorporating new people). Deconstruction, the essay concludes, need not be complicit in neoliberal dominance but, properly understood, makes us aware of the power dynamics by which the openness of plurilingualism can lead to the dominance of English.
The essay confronts the question of weathering by considering its excess to the conceptual dimension and relating it to what Jacques Derrida names (the) 'trace'. The study of the 'logic' of weathering/the trace is confronted with Giorgio Agamben's critique of Derrida's project. Their two different conceptions of language, of its presuppositional structure, and of its order of 'metaphysical presence' are considered, in particular by turning to Werner Hamacher's work on these and related matters.
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the 'work of literature'. J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life 'washed clean' of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether 'other'. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the 'likeness' in this world? Are we to read Coetzee's novel like Simón or like David - and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?